


A House on Fire

by reeby10



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Architectural Horror, Case Fic, Community: quicky_bang, Gen, Haunted Houses, Implied/Referenced Character Death, enclosed spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 18:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8171872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/pseuds/reeby10
Summary: Suddenly, there’s a door on her left. She stops as soon as she sees it, gun not wavering from where she has it held in front of her. There’s no new sound, nothing to hint at what may lay beyond.“What the fuck,” she sighs, and clenches the flashlight between her teeth before reaching for the doorknob.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



> I was really excited to write this for you and I had a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it, Snickfic :)
> 
> This diverges from canon in season two (I think?) when Jo starts hunting by herself. Title is from a quote by Tennessee Williams.
> 
>  **ETA:** Now with art by the lovely meesasometimes for the Quicky Bang 2017! Some of the art is embeded below, see the rest [here](http://meesasometimes.livejournal.com/92431.html).

The house is unlike any other Jo’s seen before, whether on a hunt or just traveling in between. She thinks it’s Victorian, which matches the time period she’d found in her initial research, but there’s something _wrong_ about it. It’s less something physical than just a feeling she gets when her eyes alight on the peeling brown paint and cracked windows.

She stops just outside of the wrought iron fence that surrounds the property. It looks far more like something that would be found around a cemetery than one of the biggest historical landmarks in town, too dark and decrepit and sinister for a house that was once a museum. There’s still a sign next to the gate, weather worn but still readable. The house only served as a museum for a few months before all the staff were run off, but no one ever bothered to take down the sign.

Looking at the house, feeling the aura of _wrongness_ even out here behind the fence, she doesn’t really blame them.

Still, she’s got a job to do, so she carefully opens the creaking gate and heads up to the front door. The stones of the walk are mostly broken, browning grass peeking up through the cracks and trying to trip her with their crawling shoots. She kicks at them when they snag against her boots, refusing to let something as ridiculous as grass get the better of her when she’s got a malevolent, murderous ghost to look forward to in the house.

“You can do this, Jo,” she mutters to herself, hitching her backpack more securely on her shoulders and checking to make sure her handgun is still in place. “It’s just another ghost.”

The front door is cracked open just enough for her to squeeze inside, a small pile of grit on the ground telling her it’s been that way for a long while. It’s probably how the missing teens got in over the years, though there are plenty of windows they could have broken into as well. She wonders for a moment if they felt the same wrongness about the place as she does, but dismisses the thought. They’re probably all dead already, and it’s her job to make sure the ghost will have no more victims. There’s no point bothering with anything else.

The inside of the house is dark, barely any of the late afternoon sunlight making it through the grimy windows. She squints around for only a moment before reaching back and pulling out her flashlight. Her best bet for finding whatever skeleton she needs to salt and burn is the basement, where they buried the children who died there when it was an orphanage over a century ago. As dark as it is up here, it will be darker still down there.

She heads further into the house, keeping her eyes peeled for stairs that will lead her down. It takes her longer than it should to realize that the hallway she’s walking down is far too long to fit in the house. She freezes, hand tightening on the flashlight and the other drifting toward the gun at her side. For a long moment there’s no sound but the hiss of wind through broken windows further ahead, sounding eerily like some huge creature breathing.

Then she hears it.

It’s the cry of a child in anguish, suddenly cut off, and she whirls, gun in hand and pointed straight ahead of her. There’s nothing there. The hallway she’d come down looks entirely different than when she passed through only minutes before. There are doors there that weren’t before, and even the wallpaper seems different. She looks closely, eyes widening as she realizes the blood red flowers on the walls are moving, almost pulsing in some strange rhythm.

She jerks back, heart thundering. This is nothing she’s seen or heard of before, nothing she was prepared for. Ghosts she can handle, _has_ handled. Something about this, though, is different, is _wrong_ , and she can’t quite put her finger on what it is.

Determined to figure this out and _get_ out as soon as possible, she turns back around and continues down the hall. It goes on as far as she can see, and no matter how fast she walks, she doesn’t seem to get anywhere. A chill is starting to settle down her spine, making her itch with an unidentifiable fear of this house that is not behaving at all like it should.

Suddenly, there’s a door on her left. She stops as soon as she sees it, gun not wavering from where she has it held in front of her. There’s no new sound, nothing to hint at what may lay beyond.

“What the fuck,” she sighs, and clenches the flashlight between her teeth before reaching for the doorknob.

She steps through the doorway into a room that looks exactly like the entranceway of the house. Her eye catches on something on the ground and she directs the beam of her flashlight. There, in the dust, are her footprints. It doesn’t just look like the entranceway of the house, it _is_ the entranceway of the house. Somehow the door that should have led further into the house just led her back here.

All the strangeness starts to come together in her mind, pointing at one thing, and she finally realizes what she’d been missing this whole time. The house isn’t haunted by a ghost, it’s the house itself.

The thought has barely occurred to her before she’s suddenly flying through the air, thrown into the wall behind her by the malevolent energy of the house. Something gives beneath her weight and then she’s falling, falling falling…

***

When Jo wakes up, it’s pitch dark. Her head and back ache in time with her pulse and it’s hard to concentrate enough to begin to figure out where she is and how to get out. She stretches out a hand, bumping into a wall after only a few inches. Slowly, breath beginning to come in shorter and shorter gasps, she traces the wall to find it continues around and above her at the same distance with no obvious opening.

She’s trapped.

Panicked, she realizes it’s just like the time with ghost of H.H. Holmes, except this time there’s no Winchesters to rescue her. No one knows she’s here, not even her mother. She just wanted to be a hunter, wanted to save lives. This couldn’t be the end of her, trapped by some fucking haunted house.

Trying to control her breathing, she concentrates on her surroundings. The walls and floor and ceiling are all wood, the same worn material as the areas she walked through earlier. If she has something to use, she might be able to pry her way out. Her backpack, a little crushed by being thrown into the wall, is still on her back, which is the only positive she could see at the moment.

She reaches back, hand scrabbling about inside the pack as she tries to find something, anything, that will work. Her flashlight was lost when she fell, so she can only tell what anything is from touch. A zippo lighter, a can of lighter fluid, a container of rock salt, granola bars, papers from her research, extra ammo for the gun that had been lost as well… Nothing to break through the wooden walls.

By force of will alone, she holds back the wail of claustrophobic horror that bubbles deep in her throat. There’s no way out. There’s nothing she can do.

She floats in a sort of terrified haze for how long she doesn’t know. Vaguely, she wonders if any of the other victims are trapped like this somewhere else in the house, or were before they died. Eventually she realizes that the echoing sound of her breathing isn’t the only thing she can hear. There’s something else there, something deeper and darker. It resonates through her body, an animalistic pulsing that makes the hair on the back of her neck raise.

It’s something primal, like the movement of the wallpaper earlier. Then it hits her. It’s the sound of a body from the inside, surrounding her in the sound of breath and blood and digestion. She’s in the belly of the beast and it’s trying to eat her.

The realization has her curled in a ball, an instinctive response that she resents almost more than how she’s trapped here. She should be strong. She should be brave. But there’s nothing left for her to do but wait for this malevolent creature to kill her as it’s killed all those missing teens. She’s at the end of her rope with not even an inkling of light in sight.

The worst part of it isn’t that her mother’s never going to know what happened to her, though that thought makes something sour well up in her stomach. She never wanted to leave her mother all alone like this. No, the worst part is that she can’t even finish what she came here to do. She wanted to be a hunter, she wanted to save people, and it’s all going to end with this hunt. The house will continue to trap and kill until some other better prepared hunter comes along. They’ll probably never even find her body.

It’s the thought that someone else will eventually be the one to finish what she started that really rankles. There has to be something she can do even here, something that won’t have her starving or suffocating in the bowels of an evil house. She only has a few supplies, but they have to be enough to do _something_. She can’t accept anything else.

Gritting her teeth against the fear of what she’s decided to do, Jo pulls out the papers and lighter fluid and zippo from her backpack. There are cracks and crevices in the wall, not enough to pry anything loose, but enough for this. Going by feel alone, ignoring the splinters that prick the tips of her fingers, she stuffs the papers in wherever she can.

The next step is a little harder without being able to see, but she has a pretty good idea of the small space now. She’s careful with the lighter fluid, not wanting to get it on her. She can hear it hitting the wall when she squeezes, dripping down and pooling in the corners of her little box. The harsh smell is almost overwhelming without circulating air to dampen it.

She flicks the lighter until it catches, smiling grimly as the fluid-soaked wood and paper in front of her catches, spreading even faster than she expects. She can feel the flames on her face as she pulls back as far as possible against the opposite wall, an instinctual, primal fear surging through her along with sick satisfaction.

If she’s going down, she’s taking the whole fucking house with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Concrit welcome. If you like my fic, feel free to come hit me up [on tumblr](http://voldiebuns.tumblr.com/)!


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